These new CDs are not being introduced as a simple addition to the consumer market, as they were produced with the consciousness that authentic Byzantine melody is not music intended for popular consumption, nor can it become an object of commercialization. On the contrary, Byzantine music belongs to the realm of transcendence. It is word [logos] in musical form, the word of revelation and disclosure of truth and the experience of the Church that is not related to the provocation of the senses, emotion, pleasure, or delight. The beauty, therefore, of Byzantine music does not have an aesthetic basis, but rather an ontological one, which imprints and defines this beauty in both an iconic and Eucharistic fashion in the Divine Services.

This book provides an interpretive narrative of the wars fought by Bulgaria against the Byzantine Empire for dominant control of the Balkan Peninsula during the early medieval era. Over a span of two centuries, from the early ninth through the early eleventh, and under the leadership of the Bulgarian rulers Krum, Simeon I, and Samuil, those conflicts evolved from simple confrontations for territorial possession into a life-or-death struggle for imperial precedence within the Orthodox world then emerging in Eastern Europe—a struggle that the Bulgarians ultimately lost.

This book provides an interpretive narrative of the wars fought by Bulgaria against the Byzantine Empire for dominant control of the Balkan Peninsula during the early medieval era. Over a span of two centuries, from the early ninth through the early eleventh, and under the leadership of the Bulgarian rulers Krum, Simeon I, and Samuil, those conflicts evolved from simple confrontations for territorial possession into a life-or-death struggle for imperial precedence within the Orthodox world then emerging in Eastern Europe—a struggle that the Bulgarians ultimately lost.